We're going to be refreshing our storage solutions, starting with backups. We are currently using a single tier, single controller Compellent array to store backups and the plan is to merge that into our production Compellent array once we have a replacement backup system in place. Wish I could say there was a budget, but that's a long story. Short version: we have 288TB (raw), no compression or dedup beyond what Veeam provides, and spend about 0.64 per usable GB and would like to find something better.

The IT Director and I like Exagrid on paper, and I have no clue what Dell will push (I get the impression the DR4100 is going away.) I'm sure most of you have been through this already, so I hope I can save some time by getting a few recommendations on what works the best with Veeam, or some advice on what vendors or setups to avoid. I'd rather initiate contact with as few sales folks as possible. I've already heard from one vendor (who happens to be Veeam certified) and of course their advice leans heavily toward their own product. Appreciate anything you can offer.

I second both of these. Though if you don't want to go as big as the 4510 you could get two Apollo 4200 units instead. It might be alittle cheaper but not by much since 80% of the cost is going to be disks but you'll end up with almost the same storage (each 4200 can hold 28 LFF disks, so 56 disks total compared to the 68 LFF disks of the 4510). You'd also have less processing power I believe, since you'd only have two proxies and the 4510 has 3 nodes I believe which gives you three.

Also remember you'd be able to replace your backup servers as well with any of these devices which should be a plus.

We are in the process of moving our veeam backups off a 3par 7200 with 10K and 7.2K spinning disks in our DR site to one Supermicro SC847 4U chassis with 36 x 6TB 7.2K disks in a JBOD with SAS3 connections. The server acts as repository with 24 disks in RAID6 and 12 in RAID10. These two spaces are used in a SOBR with fulls on the RAID6 and incrementals on the RAID10. It is connected to the SAN fabric with a FC card for access to storage snapshots and has 10G ethernet for copies from other servers if needed. The server also acts as a proxy.

I have to say I couldnt be happier, we are seeing very good performance, better than I anticipated.

Although this isnt big enough for your needs there is no reason why you could add another JBOD for extra capacity. The other upside is that it is cheap! We will run Windows 2012R2 without dedup and once 2016 has been in the wild a little bit we will consider moving to this and enabling dedup to see how it helps. This kind of machine will definitely be our strategy going forward.

cjack03 wrote:Although this isnt big enough for your needs there is no reason why you could add another JBOD for extra capacity. The other upside is that it is cheap! We will run Windows 2012R2 without dedup and once 2016 has been in the wild a little bit we will consider moving to this and enabling dedup to see how it helps. This kind of machine will definitely be our strategy going forward.

I think we will probably look to stick with dedup rather than ReFS. We have experience with dedup in windows 2012 and the improvements in 2016 look really exciting. Although RefS does look fantastic i'm not sure I'd be willing to use this technology in our production environment so quickly after launch.

We will however keep a close eye on real world experiences and get a lab up and running to test when its GA.

igarcia1 wrote:We're going to be refreshing our storage solutions, starting with backups. We are currently using a single tier, single controller Compellent array to store backups and the plan is to merge that into our production Compellent array once we have a replacement backup system in place. Wish I could say there was a budget, but that's a long story. Short version: we have 288TB (raw), no compression or dedup beyond what Veeam provides, and spend about 0.64 per usable GB and would like to find something better.

The IT Director and I like Exagrid on paper, and I have no clue what Dell will push (I get the impression the DR4100 is going away.) I'm sure most of you have been through this already, so I hope I can save some time by getting a few recommendations on what works the best with Veeam, or some advice on what vendors or setups to avoid. I'd rather initiate contact with as few sales folks as possible. I've already heard from one vendor (who happens to be Veeam certified) and of course their advice leans heavily toward their own product. Appreciate anything you can offer.

What did you settle on as your new backup solution? Do you have a short-list of devices that look good for that sort of size?